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Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience

January 22, 2013 By Anne 6 Comments

As a society, we’ve been talking about youth online risk for years, but we’ve only just begun to talk about young people’s resilience, which is what helps them keep risk from turning into harm. It’s important to know, as the authors of an important new report note, that resilience – the ability to deal with negative experiences without being upset by them – doesn’t come from avoiding risk, online or offline.

“Risk and resilience go hand in hand, as resilience can only develop through exposure to risks or stressful events. Consequently, as children learn how to adequately cope with (online) adversities, they develop (online) resilience,” write Leen d’Haenens, Sofie Vandoninck and Verónica Donoso of EU Kids Online in the UK.

Here are some things parents and educators need to know about resilience:

  • What it enables: “Resilient children are able to tackle adverse situations in a problem-focused way, and to transfer negative emotions into positive (or neutral) feelings,” the authors write.
  • Gender differences: Boys were less resilient at a younger age, girls were less resilient as teenagers.
  • Online and offline inseparable: “Children with more psychological problems suffer more from online as well as offline risks” (resonant with findings of a just-released study in the US that builds on earlier research cited here)
  • Most popular coping strategy (but resilient kids usually use more than 1): “Talking to somebody is the most popular employed strategy, regardless of the type of risk, especially among girls and younger children who tend to employ this communicative strategy more often.” The authors recommend encouraging “open communication, both at home and at school.”
  • Other education needed: Teach children effective coping strategies, including blocking and abuse-reporting tools, but especially social-emotional literacy (I added the latter, based on other research and the authors’ advice that “special attention to children with low self-efficacy and psychological difficulties … is crucial.”
  • It’s not either/or, but a spectrum: “Being resilient is not a simple ‘yes or no’ question, and … would rather be understood as a continuum from very low to very high resilience.” Over all, “girls, younger children, children with more psychological problems, those receiving more support from their friends, children whose parents mediated their internet use and children whose parents were low internet users were less resilient.”
  • Parents’ own tech use a significant factor: Promoting Net use by parents “is crucial, as parents who are frequent internet users themselves feel more confident with the medium, and also feel more confident in guiding their children … promoting a positive attitude toward online safety and proactive coping strategies.”
  • Mediation better than restriction: In terms of parenting style, the authors write that “monitoring or mediating approaches seem to be more beneficial for children’s online resilience than restrictive ones.” They add that more research is needed for different types of risks and on social practices of young people (such as the article in Pediatrics discussed below).
  • Taking away the Net doesn’t help: It’s related to a passive or fatalistic approach that doesn’t build self-confidence or -efficacy online, the researchers found. “Going offline was related to missing out on online opportunities, and the problem could easily re-occur because the cause had not been tackled.”
  • Educators key too: Teachers are needed to “stimulate their pupils to resort to proactive problem-solving strategies,” so “sufficient digital skills among the teachers themselves are therefore essential.”

Zooming in on young people’s top coping strategy: “Talking with somebody” was the most popular one regardless of the problem encountered,” according to the report. In the case of bullying, 77% of the victims talked to someone after an incident; 53% “did so after seeing disturbing sexual content.” But they often use several strategies at once – for example, “deleting unwelcome messages [41%] and blocking the sender [46%]” in cases of bullying and 38% and 40%, respectively, in cases of sexting. Did that help? Yes, the authors found, 92% of young people who reported deleting unwelcome sexual content and 78% of those who blocked the sender in bullying cases said those strategies helped.

It’s great to see research turning up substantive evidence of young people’s resourcefulness as well as resilience online. Remember that this research is based on surveys of more than 25,000 youth in 25 countries.

Related links

  • “Parenting or (digital) public humiliation?”
  • “The trust factor in parenting online kids”
  • “Private vs. public parenting (& a Pew study)”
  • “Teachers’ views on how tech’s changing students”
  • More from EU Kids Online: “From Europe, Top 10 online risk myths” (their Web site is here)
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Filed Under: Parenting, Research, Risk & Safety Tagged With: e-safety, EU Kids Online, Internet safety, online safety, research, resilience, youth online risk

Reader Interactions

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  1. Yup. New ‘Blue Whale’ with a Momo-style twist - NetFamilyNews.org says:
    July 16, 2020 at 7:04 am

    […] but if the aim is to remove all risk from our children’s lives, it’s a bit misguided. As EU Kids Online reported seven years ago, risk and resilience go hand-in-hand. Kids can’t develop resilience without some […]

    Reply
  2. IBPA 2016: Focus on the positive – International Bullying Prevention Association says:
    January 19, 2017 at 9:51 am

    […] on “online resilience.” “Risk and resilience go hand-in-hand,” those researchers wrote (see this). Not that we create adversity for our children, but if we try to remove all negativity from their […]

    Reply
  3. Powerful lessons for preventing bullying & cyberbullying by Anne Collier says:
    October 6, 2014 at 10:13 am

    […] in hand, as resilience can only develop through exposure to risks or stressful events,” reported EU Kids Online. “Consequently, as children learn how to adequately cope with (online) adversities, they develop […]

    Reply
  4. Factors in good policymaking about youth & digital media - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    March 13, 2014 at 8:40 pm

    […] “Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience” […]

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  5. Social cruelty on Ask.fm & the whack-a-mole tendency - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    February 26, 2014 at 11:36 pm

    […] Those heart-to-hearts plus the life lessons that come from working through things with peers build resilience, the internal protection that will always be with them, online and offline. But just as was true […]

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  6. Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience says:
    January 22, 2013 at 5:46 pm

    […] talking about youth online risk for years, but we’ve only just begun to talk about Source: Net Family News Bookmark the […]

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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